Welcome back to the Two Navy Guys Debrief, the (mostly) weekly forum where we look at a national security issue and how we have explored that topic in our fiction.
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This week, RS wrote a generous review of Threat Axis, Book 4 in our Command and Control series, that we’d like to use a jumping off point for today’s discussion. RS wrote:
…very prescient, given recent news in Russia, as a private military company becomes a little too big for its britches and undertakes a plan, for profit, that threatens to unsettle the global balance of power.
Since the Wagner Group’s aborted coup attempt a week ago, we’ve gotten a number of emails and reviews that say some version of the same thing, so maybe it’s worth explaining how we “predicted” this turn of events.
Our goal in writing the Command and Control series was to explore what a realistic 21st century Great Powers conflict might look like. (Pro tip: Big projects like this one are much easier if one of the writers is a career naval intelligence officer.)
We modeled our storylines on four areas:
Who’s who in the zoo: The first consideration was the global players. The world is shifting from a US-centric, unipolar environment following the collapse of the Soviet Union to a bipolar axis. Autocratic-curious China, with sidekick Russia, dominates one side of a continuum with the United States and most NATO allies on the other pole. In the muddy middle are Africa, Central Asia, the Middle East, and South America, all being swayed by one side or the other.
There is a new “non-aligned movement” of states using the bipolar axis to seek benefits for their respective nations. Smart, in our view, even if it is problematic for American national security interests.
The Tools of Power: The tools of influence for these global players have expanded. The use of social media is both a means of transparency as well as a platform for large scale disinformation. Low level, persistent cyber warfare is a given now. Globalization has allowed economics as an incentive (or as blackmail) to figure prominently in our novels.
Technology: We’ve spilled a considerable amount of ink on the topic of technology in modern warfare. In every novel of the Command and Control series, we show how the rapid development of unmanned weapons platforms and artificial intelligence increases both the lethality and speed of warfare. Like the introduction of the machine gun or German U-boats in World War I, technology is driving massive changes on the battlefield. We wanted to wrestle with both the practical and the moral implications of those future scenarios.
Politics: It’s impossible to write a book about future warfare without delving into politics. To be clear, we’re not talking about US domestic Democrat versus Republican stuff. We mean politics on a grand scale, as in how it affects international relations and foreign policy.
Why? Because countries are led by people and people are flawed. People are making the decisions that pit one country against another. Without Putin, there would be no war in Ukraine. (And with Putin, the war in Ukraine will never really end.)
In a more practical sense, stories are about people. No people, no story.
With that long warm up about our thought process, let’s look at the events in Russia last week.
In one sense, the “coup” was unsurprising. The leader of the Wagner group has been an outspoken critic of the Russian military leadership—and by extension, Mr. Putin’s—execution of the war for some months.
Prigozhin thinks the Russian attacks on Ukraine have not been brutal enough. In his mind, his mercenaries are the only reason why Russia has made any gains in the last nine months. In Threat Axis, we described a CEO of a private military contractor who was also drinking his own Kool-Aid. We’re thinking our depiction has some shades of truth to it.
That Wagner would take the next step of occupying the Russian Southern Command HQ is bold, but what interested us was the public reception to this move. Instead of panic that their government was being overthrown, the Wagner troops were welcomed by the welcomed by the population. Why?
We suggest that Mr. Putin’s propaganda culture is to blame. Every day he works aggressively to convince his people that black is white and the sky is green. There is no war in Ukraine, Mr. Putin assures them. It’s a “special military operation” to combat Nazis.
When you are bombarded by baloney, eventually you stop trying to tell fact from fiction. You give up and ignore everything. Apathy sets in.
But that apathy cuts both ways. As writer Anne Appelbaum put it in a New York Times piece:
Nobody seemed to mind, particularly, that a brutal new warlord had arrived to replace the existing regime—not the security services, not the army, and not the general public.
Then it got weird. Mr. Putin, the consummate strong man autocrat, cut a deal with the leader of the coup to stay in power for another day. Suddenly, out of nowhere, the president of Belarus intervened and offered safe harbor to the Wagner Group.
That last bit got our attention. Long time readers will recall that Belarus figured prominently in Order of Battle as a way for President Luchnik (our fictional Putin) to expand the war in Ukraine…
So for now, things are back to normal—at least, that’s what Mr. Putin wants us to believe. We are not buying that for a hot minute. This “coup” story is far from over.
How does this all end? We’re going to circle back to a post called The Rise of the Private Army that we wrote a few months ago:
These PMCs [like Wagner Group] are private, for-profit ventures, lethal armed forces that number in the thousands with more military capability than some small countries. Raise your hand if you believe they will just fold up their tents and retire to their Black Sea resorts in Sochi, Russia.
Um, we don’t think so, either.
In keeping with our discussion about what we’re trying to accomplish with the entirety of the Command and Control series, here’s a fitting review from Thomas W Henderson:
In the air, in space, on and under the sea, and on the land this author covers the potential reality of multidimensional warfare in Asia. As a combat veteran, I was completely drawn in to areas I knew and didn’t know. This is a full sensory read. Portions of it almost made me feel like I was there in a firefight.
Wow, Thomas, thank you so much for those very kind words. If you want to say your piece about our novels, you can leave your own review HERE.
On his radio show, National Security This Week, JR’s guest is retired US Army Colonel Chris Costa, Executive Director of the International Spy Museum in Washington, DC. They discuss the spy museum, his career in the field of Human Intelligence, and current events.
Be happy. Stay healthy. Read (or listen to) a book.
As always, thanks for being a supporter –
David & JR, AKA the Two Navy Guys
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